Tiscali attacked by DDoSers

Tiscali appears to have become the latest ISP targeted whose service has been disrupted by denial of service attacks from unknown Internet vandals.

A posting on ISP's status page on Sunday (since removed) said: "We are currently experiencing a denial of service attack on our infrastructure. Tiscali customers can still surf the internet and send and receive email, but may experience intermittent difficulties when accessing the Tiscali Web site."

Register readers have reported packet loss and generally patchy internet connections over the weekend, and an updated notice admits "customers dialling up to the Internet via other networks may experience problems accessing the Tiscali Portal" and associated services. It recommends customers connect to the Internet via Tiscali dial up connections and states its engineers have identified the problem and are in the process of restoring services to normal.

The extent and exact cause of the problem remains unclear and repeated calls through Tiscali's PR operation today failed to yield any response.

Last week the much smaller ISP Cloud Nine experienced a crippling denial of service attack, which brought it to its knees. It subsequently shut up its operations and sold its 2,500 customer base to Zetnet. ®